Archive for July, 2012

In this exhibition, Messager’s role as inventive collector and bricoleur of daily life in the practice of making sculpture transforms and takes on new forms as her works move from the dark whimsy of the domestic and familial to the illusory world of sci-fi invention and Swiftian imagination. In both, she presents a glimpse at an unseen, fossilized world.

The show will feature works by ceramic artist Elisabeth Kley, glass artist John Drury, painter Robert Goldman and Robinson. The exhibition aims to present underrepresented artists with an idiosyncratic sensibility. The title of the show Claxons (or loud horns) refers to the idea that artists create dissonance and cacophony.

For women, rules define a set of social expectations that are meant to keep them under control. In the arts, purportedly so much more liberal than the rest of society, this problem is acutely magnified, since culture tells us who we are, both literally and imaginatively. For the exhibition In the Pink at Joe Sheftel Gallery, which focuses on art about the female body, curator Sarvia Jasso has brought together a group of younger women artists with women artists from earlier generations

Art in action! Sometimes, strolling through museums and galleries, one can disassociate the works from the artist, reducing them to pleasing pretty independent objects strung to walls, not the product of someone’s expression, labor, and intent. For that reason, please refer to our sparsely annotated, mini-clip-playlist of artists at work on their art. Watch Picasso delight himself by drawings flowers. See Yayoi Kusama scribble madly away. Behold Basquiat spray painting wisdom on the walls of downtown New York. Remind yourself that this all did not just come to be, but spilled, splattered, and flowed out of our visual art icons — and it didn’t always come easy.

On the surface of this well-fueled publicity blitz, Yayoi Kusama is a dotty (pun intended) old grandma all about fun, polka dots and puffy balloons, including her eye-popping window display for the Louis Vuitton store on Fifth Avenue and 57thStreet. On the inside, which all the W magazine air kisses in the world can’t conceal, Kusama is about decades of raging struggles with precarious mental balance, gender, ethnicity, money, power, class, self-mythology, annihilation, life and death, peppered with a bit of wonder……